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Knocking On Heaven's Door: The Path To A Better Way Of Death (2013)

by Katy Butler(Favorite Author)

4.15 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1451641974 (ISBN13: 9781451641974)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Scribner

review 1: Anyone who thinks they have adequately arranged for end-of-life issues with living wills, advanced directives, DNRs, and designated health care agents and/or power of attorney authorization, should read this book. Part memoir, part investigative report, part history of the process of dying, and part suggestion for better ways through the maze of dying, Amy Butler describes her aging parents’ nightmare journey and thus her own troubling and troubled family relationships and struggles with a perplexing healthcare industry comprised of powerful medical, pharmaceutical, and insurance lobbies.Well written and organized, the book weaves all of this into a page-turning narrative. Butler exposes the complex and counter-intuitive regulations that govern insurance payments and Med... moreicare benefits. She demonstrates out how one innocent procedure sometimes cascades into a sudden plunge over a cliff of decreasing quality of life juxtaposed against increased, expensive, painful, and often pointless medical interventions.She discusses ideas such as the Good Death we all wish for versus the many different faces of death. She probes Slow Medicine, ethics of end-of-life care, and the subtle differences between hospice and palliative care. Her warning that “it is the demented with no close relatives who are most likely to be subjected to feeding tubes and other life-prolonging and suffering-prolonging measures” is chilling.The last chapter, Notes For a New Art of Dying, describes six stages of dying and what to expect while helping a loved one negotiate the last phase of life. This is followed by an extensive list of resources to help readers empower themselves in areas as diverse as: Caring for the caregiver; government and organization support, legalities, descriptions of DNRs, ADs, POLSTs, medical guardianships, bad deaths, and bereavement.
review 2: The uncomfortably candid retelling of the author's father's final years of life reveals the problems with end-of-life health care in the united states. It's an engaging mix of memoir, investigative reporting and philosophizing about the end of life. More than anything, this book made me think hard about the process of informed consent that I go through with my patients. I was imagining the physician that consented this family for placement of a pacemaker (the crux of the book) and thinking that it's unlikely that I would have described the eventual outcome that caused the family so much distress as part of the consent process. While the circumstances in which I obtain consent are not quite the same, I think that I will do a better job with that process after reading this book. less

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